This is no ordinary rejection story. It is much more, starting with the protagonists. There is the multinational. Powerful, untouchable, bread and butter for one of the poorest territories in Italy, the Sulcis. There are the top managers, those of yesterday and today. There are the former trade unionists, those who suddenly became consultants of the multinational and, then, sensationally business partners. Above all, there is Sardinia, once again prey and destination for the trafficking of less noble waste, for wanting to be guaranteed.

A name, a guarantee – The story unfolds between encrypted contracts, hidden in Swiss safes and in the very personal archives of the protagonists. Money, many, millions and millions of euros, transformed into a whirlwind of business and poisons. Industrial waste, dangerous, declared as a "good thing" for productions of which nobody knows anything. The mechanism that emerges is unprecedented and at the same time perverse: there are the processing scraps of one of the most controversial factories in the mining-metallurgical history of Sardinia, Portovesme Srl. A name given to it with the sole intention of mitigating the weight of the multinational that behind it: the Swiss Glencore.

A tortured land - History, here, in this land tortured by poisons and fulminating aerosols, leaves no margins. The pollution between Portovesme and its surroundings has dug deep, has invaded the bowels of the earth, transformed into toxic-noxious landfills, sometimes illegal, sometimes created thanks to controversial authorizations. The water tables are perpetually injected with leachates of which nothing is known, of which little is known. Difficult to trust those who for decades have escaped, in one way or another, the obligation of reclamation. The story, that of these days, uncovered by the Prosecutor of the Republic of Cagliari, is much more than an environmental investigation. The judicial procedural phases aim at the horizon of the closure of the investigations. In a few days, the 20 days within which the suspects will be able, if they wish, to present justifications or repentance will expire.

The crimes, the indelible facts – It will be the history, the judicial one, to tell if what has been ascertained by the investigators constitutes a crime or not. There is no doubt, however, that, regardless of the criminal aspect of the affair, circumscribed in every detail in the investigation signed by two prosecutors who have left nothing to chance, Rita Cariello and Rossella Spano, there are full-blown facts, slapped under everyone's eyes in a river full of waste. The Pedemontana, the road that connects the interior of the Sulcis with the gates of Cagliari, on the side of Macchiareddu, transformed for years into a real conveyor belt of substances which, to the naked eye and to the invasive one of chemical microscopes, are not fertilizers for roses and flowers appeared.

They ring at Heidi's house – When the bell for the closure of the investigation rang in the residences of the suspects, many asked themselves many questions and tried to give themselves some answers. Let's start with the fatuality. The sequence of events was not helpful to the powerful multinational, the one with the fiscal residence confined between the green mountains of the Alps and the "zebra" cows of Heidi's fairy tales. The news of the closure of the investigation by the two Sardinian prosecutors comes the day after the plan unveiled by our newspaper, presented by the same multinational investigated, together with its Sardinian top management, to transform Sardinia into the largest European hub for the recycling of used batteries , those scattered around the world. A sort of gigantic global collector of waste, both unknown and dangerous. Once again, the logic of the economy based on industrial garbage is coming forward, the one that, in one way or another, sees Sardinia always dramatically protagonist. Yesterday, like today. If for the "battery waste" operation the Swiss multinational chose the nefarious name of "Black Mass", for the one written on the headed paper of the Cagliari prosecutor's office it would have liked to choose "white powder operation". If the "Black Mass" plan is a whole program, "white powder" is, instead, a dark chapter of a corporate-business intrigue all consumed in the shadow of the chimneys of two industrial areas connected only by the declaration of an area with a high environmental crisis , the Sulcis and Macchiareddu. The "white mass", only theoretically white, is not durum wheat flour. Both black and white are waste in all respects. You don't refuse as a denigration of a by-product of industrial processes, but precisely because the multinational itself in a Sardinian key, Portovesme srl, has not denied the evidence. Both for the battery slag and for that mountain of pseudo-white slag generated by the industrial process of Portovesme, it is the same company that attributes it the not very noble qualification of "hazardous special waste". The Swiss tried to mitigate the qualifications, talking about "chalks". The prosecutor didn't listen to him. The seized papers leave little margin: it was the multinational itself, on March 3, 2015, that ascertained the qualification of "special hazardous waste" for those mountains of dust. When the investigators break into Macchiareddu, in one of the many gigantic warehouses of the bankruptcy industry that ceased to live in the years of default, they don't believe in the crime that the pupils cannot even contain. The unpublished images that we publish are eloquent. Two football stadiums, more than 15 meters high, filled up to the ceiling with that "waste" that Portovesme srl had decided to "sell off" to a company without a great history, parked right in the fifth street of the industrial alcove of Macchiareddu.

Waste that overflows - That waste overflows from every door, from every window. He had to remain hidden in there, protected from prying eyes, inside that industrial warehouse transformed into a veritable indoor landfill. Too bad, however, that the waste sold as plaster did not go unnoticed by the investigators. The charges are punctual and circumscribed, the document of which we have come into possession, however, leaves no room for misunderstandings. A key document of a story that goes far beyond the environmental story. An unedited act that we publish in excerpts, as the architrave of the entire operation finished on the tables of the Palace of Justice. Three lines to clarify the relationships: «the buyer agrees to purchase and the seller agrees to sell and deliver the material described below under the terms and conditions described in this contract». The protocol is the internal one of the company headed by the Swiss multinational: «V.15.014 of 10 August 2015». Three pages signed with details, promises of money, bargaining chips for an operation that the suspects themselves, perhaps the first ones, did not think of as an icon of transparency.

Contract & Gifts – The contract items that eviscerate common sense are numbers six and thirteen. Number six is the most concise: «Price – The sale of the material takes place at the price of one (1) euro per ton as such». Practically what is described as a "good thing" is in fact given away for one euro per ton to a company that declares itself ready to reuse that waste or resell it for other production cycles. The business, however, is not here. It is in article 13 when Portovesme srl declares: «The seller (Portovesme srl-Glencore ed) will pay the buyer (Nuova Materie Prime Mediterranee ed), as a contribution for the transport and management activities, the total sum equal to Euro 26 per ton plus statutory VAT». In short, a millionaire deal, for everyone. For Portovesme srl, which got rid of that waste by selling it for one euro per ton, however taking on an impressive figure of 26 euros per ton to "sustain" the buyer's expenses.

Millionaire deal - The prosecutor's calculations are eloquent. To dispose of those 150,000 tons of waste in landfills, a lot of which were stored in the Macchiareddu warehouse, the Swiss multinational would have had to pay 43.5 million euros. He saved 40 and a half, because he practically "gave" them by selling them for one euro, complete with a "gift" of another 26 euros per ton, to the Macchiareddu company, of which a former trade unionist and former consultant of Portovesme is a partner srl. The synthesis is simple: instead of sending that waste to the landfill, it was preferred to lock it up in that gigantic shed in the Cagliari industrial area. The suspects continue to argue that that "waste" had to be reused in an imaginary production circuit. The reality is different: all that "good things" of waste, a cyclopean mountain, has always been locked up inside a shed, in the landfill on fifth avenue of Macchiareddu, land of Sardinia, a stone's throw from the industrial affairs of the Swiss multinational, in the hell of Sulcis.

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